In general, an image forming apparatus refers to an apparatus which prints print data generated in a terminal device such as a computer on a recording paper. The examples of such image forming apparatus include a copier, printer, facsimile or multi function peripheral (MFP) which comprehensively realizes those functions through one device, etc.
There are cases where companies and public offices manage tens to thousands of image forming apparatuses. In such environment, a user may select a desired image forming apparatus to perform an operation.
For example, when there are a large amount of documents to be scanned or copied, the user may divide the documents and process them separately through multiple units of image forming apparatus, rather than processing all operations in one image forming apparatus.
However, in this case, there is a convenience that a user has to individually approach to a plurality of image forming apparatuses one by one to operate them. In particular, when scanning or copying, when there are a lot of options to be applied, a large amount of options has to be applied to apparatuses individually, thereby increasing inconvenience.
Also, in this case, the user has to combine the separately-performed operations into one, which is very inconvenient. For example, to combine scan image files generated from multiple image forming apparatuses, the user has to separately perform an operation of sequentially connecting image files by means of a host device. In addition, outputs outputted per each image forming apparatus have to be collected, which is very cumbersome.
Further, even if there are several image forming apparatuses, a device which supports a function desired by a user is only limited to some, and thus, a particular image forming apparatus has to perform many operations rather than a plurality of image forming apparatuses equally divide the workload.